June 2013 Archives

I’m a hard-core Image::Magick user. I use it to automate graphics production for my board games and video games, and also use it to manipulate all of the graphics uploaded by our customers at The Game Crafter. One of my developers has been nagging me for years to switch to Imager, but Image::Magick has always worked for me, so I had no reason to switch.

I’m working on a new board game, and I just bought a new laptop, so I figured now was a good time to try out Imager, since I didn’t already have Image::Magick installed. Here’s what I’ve learned as of day one.

When you’re building a software app, you should build for the largest user-base possible, rather than the richest user-base possible.

I’d rather have $10/mo from 10,000 customers than $10,000 from 10 customers. It’s $100,000 per month either way, but if I lose one customer under the first model then it hurts far less than the second model.

Besides, if you build an app that enables to small guys to compete with the big guys, then the big guys will come knocking.

A few years back I made a video game called the Lacuna Expanse. Last year I open sourced the code for it. A few people in the community have really dove in and kept it going. They’re doing an amazing job. This is a map one of them made of the entire expanse. Each dot on there is a star system, so you can see just how massive it is.…

A couple years ago I ran a conference called YAPC, and I challenged myself to write a blog post every single day for a year about that conference. It annoyed a few people, but it taught me a valuable lesson about marketing…that daily touch point is important. If you run a blog, a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, you should attempt to post something to it every day. It makes it more interesting for the people that follow you. It keeps them coming back. And if you’re super busy like me, feel free to queue up some posts so that you don’t…

I couldn’t agree more with Genehack’s “Stop Talking About Perl” talk at YAPC this past week. We spend so much time venting hot air. That’s not going to attract new users. Instead, we need to build cool stuff. Whether you’re into building cool new ecosystems like Moose, Dist::Zillla, and Plack, or if you’re into building cool new apps like Lacuna and The Game Crafter, building cool stuff and talking about that is the way to get people excited about your language.

A lot of people think that there is some magic to starting your own business. There’s not. Just make something cool, and sell it. Then you’re in business. Also, don’t worry about getting all your paperwork ducks in a row before you start to create your product. Build your product and then determine if it’s worthy of a business. Just build something already. Why are you still reading this? Get to work.

A lot of people have asked me over the years if I had a blog or twitter feed that they could follow, and I've always answered with the blog or twitter feed of the various ventures I'm involved with. I've decided that it's high time for me to release my own blog and twitter feed for the things that aren't appropriate to any of those ventures.